Saving the Queen

by William F. Buckley

  Dodson, who found all things amusing, was tempted to laugh, but decided, his soup spoon barely out of his mouth, against doing so; instead he dropped the spoon and stuck out his hand. There was a terrible gravity in the good-by he had just received from Oakes, who now was saying good-by to Oldfield, continuing his tour around the table. The master, a young physicist called Mr. Brown, watched with fascination and suddenly found that it was his turn.

  “So long, Mr. Brown. It has been very nice to know you.”

  The table was now quiet, and as Blackford walked off stiffly to say good-by, selectively, to special friends here and there at other tables, the entire refectory gradually fell silent. Blackford appeared not to notice, and the whispering then began, in accents of awe, disbelief, and dismay. But no one did what Anthony most feared someone might do. Perhaps because everyone knew Blackford enough to know that to call him a coward would be implausible. And there was something in the precocious solemnity of the courtly tour around the large refectory that gainsaid schoolboy jeering. He did it all—from the lowly Dodson to the final occupant of the main table, the formidable head prefect, the Scottish aristocrat who, at age seventeen, was already a world-renowned equestrian—in six or seven minutes, his voice audible only to the person he was addressing. When passing by the presiding master—this week it was an utterly dumbstruck Spaniard, who taught his own language and Italian—he merely bowed slightly, stopping to shake hands with a genial prefect on his right. Then, without looking back, he opened the door of the refectory, and closed it on to an explosion, the animated bustle of three hundred boys wondering whether they could believe their eyes.

  Anthony rose from the main table, whispered to Mr. Castroviejo that he was suffering from a stomach ache, left the refectory sedately, and then rushed down the hall, catching up with Blackford at the door. Together they crossed the quadrangle and climbed the stairs to Blackford’s room, where Anthony insisted on picking up the two bulky laundry bags.

  “I’ll write to you, Anthony.”

  “But Blackford, your old man is bound to send you back. Oh God, what will they do to you then?”

  “I won’t be coming back,” said Blackford, as they walked down to find a Leicester taxi waiting. There was no one else in sight. Blackford opened the door, put one of the laundry bags on the back seat, smoothed it out, gave the other bag to the driver, eased himself in, and, gently, lowered his weight on his cushion.

  “We are driving to London,” he told the driver, and returned Anthony’s wave as the car pulled out.

  Mr. Castroviejo, revived, rushed across to the headmaster’s home to give him the news. Dr. Chase, caught at lunch with his wife and twenty-five-year-old daughter, clenched his fists on the seat of his chair, his mind racing. He could stop Oakes. But that would require physical force. And what then would he do? There were no prison cells at Greyburn. He could hardly, in Oakes’s present condition, beat him again. He resolved that at best, by attempting to detain Oakes, he would risk indignity. Oakes would be back. If it required a few days, or a week, so much the better—he would be ready for another dose of the birch, he thought smugly.

  But Dr. Chase experienced a real alarm. What if, on reaching London, Oakes should exhibit his backside to his parents? The nightmare took wings, and Dr. Chase had visions of Blackford Oakes reporting to Ambassador Kennedy or the American Embassy, and calling in the press to photograph his lacerated posteriors. What would the press in America do with that—the story of the American boy who spoke his mind in an English school!

  Chase snapped out his orders to Castroviejo. He was to go fetch Mr. Simon instantly. He would get an affidavit, Dr. Chase thought, and maybe signed statements from several of the boys in the class, testifying to Oakes’s unparalleled insolence. He did wish now that he had beaten him a little less viciously, a little less … thoroughly. Too many people are too easily shocked by the stern discipline of fine public schools, he thought. But the trustees would not like the publicity. And what if, in America, it did become a cause célèbre? How he wished he had never consented to admit young Oakes. Trust! Trust!—he remembered. He had been witness to Dr. Chase’s acid remarks about America.

  “Geraldine,” he barked to his daughter, “go right now to the refectory and get a prefect—any prefect—to find Anthony Trust. T-R-U-S-T. Have Trust come here instantly.”

  He wondered Whether he could strike pre-emptively by telephoning Sir Alec. It would be an hour and a half before Oakes reached London if he took the taxi all the way in. If he was headed for the station, it would take him—he looked at his watch—two and a half hours. Yes, that was it.

  “Camilla,” he said to his wife. “Get me the registrar on the telephone.” She would have the home telephone of Sir Alec Sharkey.

  He was not surprised, when he rang the bell, that his mother should open the door. It was obvious that Dr. Chase would report his absence and take the opportunity to vindicate Greyburn. He had steeled himself for this encounter, not knowing certainly whether her sympathy for him would be muted by dismay at his mutiny. Whatever she had planned to do, she in fact broke into tears as she hugged her boy, who had grown taller than she in the two months he had been away. He returned her embrace, but was dry-eyed.

  “I’ll be all right, Mother.”

  When she saw how he had to walk, ascending the staircase, she broke down again.

  “Don’t,” he said, climbing slowly to the living room to face Sir Alec.

  In the hour and a half’s drive he had gone over it and over it, and he found himself strangely calm. He knew only that he had to communicate to his stepfather, early in their conversation, that he would go to a reformatory school before he would go again to Greyburn: that Greyburn was out. What to do then would be a matter of probably prolonged negotiation. He was ready to begin it.

  Sir Alec was not. He looked awfully black and severe in his morning coat. But, rising, he extended his hand to Blackford and said, “We will go over the whole thing tomorrow. There is no point in doing it today. You are upset, I am upset, and your mother is upset. We shall have some tea, and talk about other matters.”

  Blackford feared that any extravagant gesture of caution, as he lowered himself into the sofa, might be interpreted as an appeal for pity. On the other hand, he guessed that his stepfather was practiced enough in the ways of Greyburn to distinguish between a routine, as distinguished from an abusive, punishment, by the precautions the victim had thereafter to take before sitting down. Blackford decided to do as he would if they were not in the room; so he sat down slowly, carefully. Even so, on the soft cushion, it was painful, as it had been in the taxi, and he yearned to go to his room and try to nap sleeping on his front.

  “Tomorrow,” his mother said, attempting cheer, “is your birthday, Blackford. I went out an hour ago and bought you one or two things, nothing in particular. We had sent a package to … Greyburn.”

  “Thank you, Mother.”

  There was silence as they stirred their tea. Sir Alec cleared his throat.

  “The war news is uniformly bad. Unless we get a great deal of instant help from America, we are very probably lost. If the Russians don’t check the winter offensive of Hitler, he’ll have all of Europe. But the situation in America is coming to a head. Roosevelt has in effect given an ultimatum to Japan, and there is no reason to suppose that Japan will stand for it.…”

  Blackford had tuned out. He was suddenly nearly sickened by fatigue, by the strain of the past four hours.

  “Would you mind”—he paused—“Alec … if I went to my room?”

  “Of course not. Carol, help the boy upstairs.”

  Mother and son walked up the second flight. His room was ready for him. His mother did not linger, kissing him lightly on the cheek and giving him two capsules and a glass of water. He disrobed, and lay down on his stomach, and awoke at eight the next morning.

  At 9:45 they drove off to church. “Look, Alec,” Blackford fought through his embarrassment, “I won’t be able to
sit in the pews. So when I stand in the back, please no fuss.”

  The church was very nearly full, and the minister prayed for national strength at this time of adversity. There were soldiers and sailors there, mostly accompanied by wives or mothers, and some very old people, fatalistic in the set of their faces, and in their routinized responses, and in the singing of the hymns. Blackford missed—for a moment, until he decisively suppressed the nostalgia—the Greyburn College choir, half of it made up of boys from the Lower School with their bel canto soprano voices, half from the throaty Upper School, under the spirited direction of Mr. Clayton, the gifted pianist, organist, and cellist, for whom the boys in the choir would do anything, so transparent was his pleasure when they did it right. He looked at his watch. The services at Greyburn would be over—they began at nine—and the boys would be free to do as they pleased for the balance of the morning, the balance of the blissful morning, that went so fast.

  His mother had decided they should all go out for lunch. The awful hour was approaching when husband and son would, discuss the future. Meanwhile there was a birthday to celebrate. The lunch was strained, but the food was good, and Blackford ate ravenously. In the taxi on the way home there was no conversation at all, and, once inside the door, his mother said she would be going up to her room; and so left the study, and the living room, for the privacy of “the two men”—“that’s what I must think of you as, Blacky, now that you are sixteen.”

  They sat down.

  “All right, tell me about it. You should know that Dr. Chase had me on the telephone for twenty minutes. So I know his side of the story.”

  Blackford related, without embellishment, in something of a monotone, the events that led to his session with Dr. Chase. He did not omit any detail of his drawing on the blackboard. But he repeated, exactly—the words were engraved in his memory—what Dr. Chase had said before and after the punishment.

  “He said, ‘Courtesy of Great Britain, sir’?”

  “Yes.”

  Sir Alec had risen and was pacing back and forth.

  “Blackford, stand up. Turn around, and drop your pants.”

  Blackford did as he was told.

  “Take them up again.”

  Blackford did so, buttoned them, and turned around. His stepfather had left the room.

  He saw him again at dinner.

  “Blackford, we’ll resume the discussion tomorrow. There’s time, and your mother wants a proper celebration.” In due course a cake with sixteen candles was brought in, and four gift-wrapped packages, a book of etchings, four ties, and a large box of chocolates sent over by Aunt Alice. The telephone rang, and Sir Alec answered it in the next room. They could hear him shouting and slamming the receiver down.

  He ran into the dining room. “The Japanese,” he said, “have attacked the United States Navy at Hawaii!”

  They spent the rest of that night listening to the radio.

  The next afternoon, the American ambassador was quoted in the newspapers as making an appeal to all American residents in England whose work was not related to the war effort to return home. Two passenger ships, under convoy, would leave on successive days, Wednesday and Thursday; and again, a fortnight later. Embassy officials were standing by, at the indicated numbers, to take reservations. Priority would be given to school children and the elderly. But men and women of any age would eventually be accommodated. The ships would ferry Americans until the last request for transportation was met. After that, there would be only irregular opportunities to leave the British Isles.

  Late in the afternoon Sir Alec advised Blackford that he would be on the S.S. Mount Vernon, leaving that Wednesday from Southampton. Sir Alec had two envelopes in his hand. He gave one to Blackford and told him to read it. It was a letter to Aunt Alice, endorsing a bank, draft of five hundred pounds. He handed him the second envelope—a copy of a dispatch he had written the afternoon before to Dr. Chase. Blackford read it, lowered it, then rushed impulsively to his stepfather, hugging him tightly—his judge, vindicator, and protector. He wept one final time, with relief and gratitude, and prepared to leave his parents, whom he vaguely suspected he would not see again until the war was over; perhaps never again. On Wednesday, feeling strong now, and self-assured, he waved from the crowded, noisy, boisterous railroad car at Waterloo Station crammed with very young and very old Americans, until they were all gone. Sir Alec’s bowler was the last object to slip from sight. He sat down with considerable aplomb, pulled out a chocolate from the recesses of his leather hand-case, popped it in his mouth, and sat comfortably, though still a little edgily, studying the sketches of Michelangelo.

  Seven

  He had cabled his mother not to attempt to meet his flight, the schedules being as wayward as he knew them to be, so he arrived at Portland Place by taxi and sat briefly staring up at the neat Georgian entrance, so similar to the abutting entrances on that spacious street, recalling the last time he had approached it alone, by taxi, a frightened, wounded schoolboy, ten years ago. He took the large suitcase from the stooped-over septuagenarian who was trying, with difficulty, to cope with it, paid him the fee, rang the doorbell, and embraced his mother, whom he hadn’t seen for a year, since she last visited New York. Sir Alec he had not seen since he left England as a schoolboy. He came down the stairs looking a great deal older, but robust, dressed in formal garb as always—a smoking jacket this time and velvet slippers. It was very late, the airplane ride had taken eleven hours, so they sat with cheese and port, and caught up. Black gave his mother perfume—she delighted in novel brands, and Sally had introduced him to Sortilège. And for his stepfather, a first edition of Johnson’s dictionary, which Black remembered he wanted and which had soaked up all the money realized by the sale of Black’s textbooks. And for both of them, from his suitcase, a ten-pound Virginia ham, a rare event in meatless England, 1951. He told them he would be busy through the following day but proposed to take them both to dinner at the 400—they wondered how he came to know about the 400—in the evening, “Because I have lots of foundation expense money I’m dying to burn up.… One of these days, Alec, I’m going to pay you back all the money you sent me while I was at Yale.”

  “If you do, you’ll get me arrested,” Sir Alec said, affecting, with some success, a Colonel Blimp chortle. The allusion was to the intricate arrangements necessary for getting money out of Great Britain to America during the “austerity” instituted by the Labour Government to husband precious dollars after the war. Sir Alec gave pounds to American friends who traveled regularly in England, which they consumed there; and, in America, they reimbursed Sir Alec through a lawyer, who paid Blackford’s bills in due course. The struggle was to keep the two figures in rough equilibrium. Anyone caught doing that kind of rinky-dink was severely handled—or so, in any case, Her Majesty’s Government was always threatening. Black kissed his mother good night, clapped Alec on the back, and walked upstairs where the butler, returned to service after the war, had unpacked his things. On his bed was a note from his mother: “Darling, I’ve dreamed of your coming back and living in London. I am too happy to tell you how I feel.” His eyes swelled with tears, and he looked down at the bed in which he had fitted so comfortably returning from Greyburn. It was a snug fit now, but he slept soundly, and serenely, and wondered what Singer Callaway would be like, that being the name of the single man in Great Britain aware, at this moment, that “Geoffrey Truax” was now in London.

  Tomorrow at ten they would meet at a safe house, 74 Park Street, and he hoped he would learn what he would be doing on the London scene, with which he felt now a fingertip’s familiarity. Callaway would be pleased, he thought to himself as sleepiness began to overcome him. Not quite like Macaulay, who could name all the Archbishops of Canterbury (how many had there been, he wondered, in 1815, when Macaulay was a schoolboy?). Let’s see, mmm, the incumbent is the 98th, subtract, hell, maybe one every fifteen years, that’s about how long they serve. 1951 minus 1815, mmm, that’s, mmm, 136, div
ided by 15, mmm, well, less than 10, because 150 divided by 15 is 10, and 136 from 150 is very nearly 15, call it 15, so that comes to 14, subtracted from 99, makes 85. Just think of it, Oakes, he said to himself, if you had gone on and finished at Greyburn, you wouldn’t be counting Archbishops of Canterbury at night before you went to sleep, you’d have all the answers memorized.…

  He rejoiced the next morning, not only in the unexpected brilliance of the sun—he thought for a moment of Casablanca as he stepped out into the sandy white—but in the self-confidence with which he stepped out, his stepfather’s Daily Telegraph rolled up in one hand, heading in the proper direction. I’ll walk down to Oxford Circus, he said to himself, then right on Oxford Street until I hit Park Street on the left. There was a bustle on the streets, and he remembered the cynical economist at Yale who commented that nothing so invigorates a city as to all but destroy it every generation or two. He was amused by the formality of the businessmen, some of them driving about in great dignity with bowler hats on tiny motor scooters they called Corgis. Twice he bumped into people, or was bumped into, and in both cases, one an older man, the other a young girl, the disengagement was accompanied by a “Sorry, sir.” The buses seemed old, and a little toy-store quaint, but there was animation everywhere, even around the war’s potholes, several of which he passed by, most of them already in the process of reconstruction. The air was brisk and light, and he could not remember a day from his school days quite like it, and wondered whether the weather was a function of his mood or the other way around.

  He knocked at #74, and a slim man, in his late forties, opened the door, at exactly 10:30 by Blackford’s watch.